That Viral Photo Of Trump And The Seven-Foot, 'Nazi Space Elves' Is Either A Hoax Or The Most Important Leak in Years

A photo nobody can source, posted by a ghost, deleted on arrival, somehow witnessed by the whole planet, and not one fact-checker on Earth can actually close the case.

When I was twelve, a trip to the grocery store with my mother meant standing in line behind an old woman with lavender hair. A whole generation of grandmothers did this, and I never once learned why.

While we waited I would pull a copy of the Weekly World News off the rack, where it always sat between the Star and the Enquirer, and beg my mother for the two-dollar cover charge.

She always caved. The whole ride home I would explain that Bat Boy had been seen with Elvis at a Waffle House in rural Alabama, that it was absolutely real and true, and that the government was covering it up. I believed every word of it. Even at twelve, I was a little tinfoil-hat nutter.

I am still that kid. The hat fits better and the checkout line is now the entire internet, but nothing else has changed.

There is a photograph going around right now of the President of the United States in the Rose Garden, standing between two seven-foot men with snow-white skin, platinum hair past their shoulders, and red coats heavy with gold.

I have looked at it more times than I want to admit. Here is the one difference between me and the kid in that grocery line. The kid was sure. He KNEW about Bat Boy. I have no idea what I am looking at.

Nobody does. That is the scary part.

I am not going to tell you it is fake. I am not going to tell you it is real. I started this morning laughing at it. I am not laughing now.

How A Grown Man Spends A Saturday

It is nine in the morning as I write this. The photo had already been loose on the internet for hours by the time it reached my feed, and it did not arrive alone. It came wrapped in jokes. Sir Escanor (𝘏𝘰𝘱𝘪𝘶𝘮 𝘚𝘭𝘢𝘺𝘦𝘳) had a run of memes going that were criminally funny. Jack Napier had already christened the two pale gentlemen the official delegation from Rivendell, which had me laughing to the point of tears.

I did the only honorable thing and started making my own shitpost memes.

Thank God our President is going to take Mordor head on this time.

For about twenty minutes I was a happy man. A guy in a chair laughing at his own jokes is close to the purest thing a person can be.

Then I clicked one tab too far and landed on a news story from 2014. The laughing stopped and things got WEIRD.

The Part Where Iran Beat Me To The Headline By A Decade

In January 2014, Iran’s semi-official Fars News Agency ran a story explaining that the United States government has been secretly run by extraterrestrials since 1945. This is a real news agency. Real people read it. They filed the story under “space.”

According to Fars, leaked Snowden documents proved a race of aliens had been steering American policy for decades. The aliens helped Nazi Germany build advanced submarines in the 1930s. They lost the war alongside the Germans. They regrouped in Nevada, as anyone would. In 1954 they sat down with President Eisenhower and made the arrangement official. The entire NSA surveillance program, Fars explained, exists to keep you from noticing them while they finish what one document called the “final phase.”

The aliens running the country had a name. The Tall Whites.

Tall, white-skinned, seven feet, platinum hair. That is the 2014 description. It is also the photo on your screen this week.

I’m probably the only person that gets this joke. I told it anyway.

I looked at the photo I had spent all morning turning into jokes. Then I looked at the Iranian story. A wire editor in Tehran had filed my entire morning of comedy as a sober news report a decade before I got there.

Fars is the same outlet that once ran an Onion satire as real news, so plenty of people read the alien story, laughed, and moved on. Whether they were right to is not the point. The point is the shape of it. Tall pale visitors. A hidden deal. A government that knows and will not say. That shape set into the culture twelve years ago and hardened. This week a photo of two tall pale visitors arrived, and the mold was already there waiting for it.

Meet The Nordics, The Galaxy’s Friendliest Houseguests

The Tall Whites are not an Iranian invention. They have been a fixture of UFO accounts for generations, traveling under a stack of names. Nordics. Pleiadians. Space Brothers. My favorite is Blonde Humanoids, which sounds less like an advanced civilization and more like a band that opened for Devo in 1987.

The description almost never changes. Six to seven feet tall. Long straight blond or white hair. Pale skin, sometimes tinted faintly blue or pastel purple. They come from the Pleiades, supposedly, and they are telepathic, supposedly. (The greys are the cold little ones who abduct people and perform unscheduled rectal exams. The Nordics are the “warm ones.”) Smiling, fatherly, endlessly concerned about the planet’s ecology. A seven-foot Scandinavian who crossed the galaxy to ask whether you have looked into composting. (People who fake concern about your problems are usually working an angle. At least the greys are honest about their buttstuff obsession.)

The fact that these ‘Nordic Aliens’ are pretty much the White Walkers from Game of Thrones with a modeling contract is not entirely lost on me.

George Adamski was the first to go public, in the 1950s. The roots run deeper, back to Helena Blavatsky and her “Ascended Masters,” because every good mystery keeps a Victorian séance somewhere in the family tree. I am fairly sure I read, somewhere in the disclosure noise of the last couple of years, someone official-sounding listing the alien species we supposedly know about, and the tall pale ones were on the list. I cannot find the clip now. Either I imagined it or it got scrubbed, and these days I cannot reliably tell those two apart.

Then there is Billy Meier. In the 1970s this Swiss farmer built a devoted following around his contact with a single glowing, peace-preaching Pleiadian woman. He loved her enough to name his entire compound after her. The Semjase Silver Star Center.

Remember her name. Semjase. We are coming back to her, and you should be sitting down when we do.

A UFO scholar named Michael Salla has argued for years that Eisenhower met Nordic visitors at Edwards Air Force Base in February 1954. The archivists at the Eisenhower Presidential Center have heard this so often they keep a stock answer ready, and the stock answer is no. The year is the part that stuck with me. Iran put Eisenhower with the Tall Whites in 1954. The Nordic crowd puts him with their beings in 1954. Two unrelated piles of strange, built decades apart by people who never met, landed on the same year.

A film historian named David J. Skal thinks the Nordic look was simply lifted from the 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still, where a tall calm visitor arrives to warn us off nuclear weapons. Clean theory. It survives right up until you notice that “the movies got there first” and “it is real” can both be true at the same time. Which raises the uglier possibility.

What if Hollywood has been the disclosure department all along, hiding the truth in plain sight inside the fiction since the first hand cranked a movie camera? Not art imitating life. Mockery. A snide little wink from people who know exactly what is out there and enjoy telling you to your face while you sit in the dark eating popcorn and call it entertainment.

I Hunted The Uniform And It Led Me To 1720

I went looking for the red coats because I wanted to give the naysayers their shot. Theirs was the calm explanation, the grown-up one. No aliens here, just an honest ceremonial delegation from one of those tidy Nordic countries with more bicycles than cars and a national love of kippered herring that rivals my own daily devotion to a single Nat Sherman luxury cigarette. Fine. Prove it. Ceremonial uniforms are catalogued to death, so all I had to do was match that high-collared scarlet and the gold braid to a real unit and the whole thing was solved. Ten minutes, I figured.

The crowd favorite was the King’s Guard of Norway, in town for a state visit. That theory dies the instant you check it. The King’s Guard of Norway wears black. Norway has a king and a prime minister, not a president, whatever a doctored Guardian headline tries to tell you.

The one time Trump actually hosted Norway at the White House, his guest was Prime Minister Erna Solberg, in January 2018, standing at a podium and notably under seven feet tall.

I widened the search. The closest match I could find to those uniforms anywhere in the historical record is a style of European court dress that went out of fashion about three hundred years ago. Powdered wigs. The era when bloodletting was still a respectable medical opinion.

No living country issues that uniform. The last men to wear it have been in the ground for three centuries. Make of that what you like. I have made several things of it, and I slept worse for every one.

The Photo With No Fingerprints

This part does not pull me away from the alien question. It drags me into the basement of it. A hoax this good makes no sense as a hoax, a photo this strange makes no sense as a leak, and the harder I look at how the thing actually moved, the worse both options get.

Start with the questions nobody is saying out loud. If somebody faked this, why? You do not spend that kind of effort to fool the world for an afternoon. And having faked it, why post it and then delete it ninety seconds later, like a man who robs a bank and immediately mails the money back? Who posted it in the first place? Every article I found tells the identical story, walks up to the same wall, and stops. It went up on X. It came down within minutes. Somewhere inside that keyhole of time, it went off like a flashbulb the size of a continent.

I have spent ten years making things on the internet, and that is not how any of this works. Virality is a fire, and fire needs three things. Fuel, air, and time on the ground to catch. A post that lives for four minutes is a lit match dropped in a downpour. It does not burn down the world. This one did. That leaves two doors, and I do not like the look of either. Behind the first, somebody with an enormous hand made sure it spread. Behind the second, it was an image the human eye simply could not put down, the way you cannot look away from a car wrapped around a telephone pole. Pick your door. They both open onto something built on purpose.

Then there is the orphan problem. I read a dozen write-ups. Not one names the account that posted the single most-discussed photograph on Earth. The one fact that would crack the case open, a handle, a human being who pushed the button, is gone from every story, papered over with the phrase “a viral post.” That is reporter for nobody knows, and nobody is checking. A photograph with no father, no birth certificate, and no return address had conquered the planet by lunch, and the entire press corps shrugged and called it a slow news day.

Then the fact-checkers arrived, and this is the part that lifts the hair off my arms. They came overnight, in a swarm, fast and confident and nearly word for word identical, a flock of birds all banking at once on a signal none of us could see. AI-generated, they announced. Case closed. Read past the headline and the certainty drains straight through the floor. The metadata does not carry the fingerprints a generated image is supposed to leave behind. Several of those same outlets admit, way down where they hope you stop reading, that nothing about it is actually conclusive. The verdict, stripped of its headline, is a shrug in a lab coat, handed down at three in the morning by a hundred strangers who all somehow got the same memo.

Lay it end to end. A ghost posts a photo. The ghost deletes it. The orphaned copy becomes the most-seen image alive. By dawn a wall of debunkers has ruled it fake while quietly conceding it cannot be proven fake. The one person who could end every argument in four seconds, the one who took it or made it or found it, has vanished off the network without a trace.

That does not prove there were aliens in the Rose Garden. It proves something colder. If there ever had been, this is the exact shape the cover-up would take. A genuine leak and a flawless hoax now leave the same prints, which is to say no prints at all, and somewhere out past all this noise is a person, or a thing, betting everything on a single fact. You will never be able to tell which one you are looking at.

The Part Where I Stopped Laughing

Back to Semjase.

I was reading about Billy Meier’s radiant Pleiadian, still half-grinning, ready to shelve her next to Bat Boy and the Waffle House. Her name caught on something at the back of my mind. I had heard it before. Not in any UFO book. Somewhere much older, and much worse.

Open the Book of Enoch. It is one of the oldest records we have of the world before the Flood. It tells of the Watchers, the angels who abandoned their station and came down to Earth. They took human wives. They fathered the Nephilim, a race of giants. They taught mankind the things mankind was never meant to have. How to forge weapons. How to wage war. How to enchant. How to deceive.

The angel who led them, the chief of the two hundred, the one who organized the rebellion and pulled heaven down into the dirt, is named in the manuscripts Samyaza. Sometimes Shemyaza. In the old Slavonic copies of Enoch his name is written Semjâzâ.

Semjâzâ.

Semjase.

I have searched, and I cannot find one other living person who has set those two names side by side. A Swiss farmer’s gorgeous, telepathic, eco-conscious space-angel carries the same name, syllable for syllable, as the field marshal of the fallen. The whole internet was too busy making Game of Thrones meme-jokes to look it up.

So was I. I made the jokes. I am not above any of this. I looked, and once you see it you cannot unsee it.

What If They Were Never Aliens At All

I have argued for years, to anyone who would sit still long enough, that the things we call aliens are not aliens. The greys, the Nordics, the Tall Whites, Billy Meier’s glowing space-angel, all of them are the same beings the ancients met and named correctly the first time. Not visitors from a distant star. Fallen ones. Watchers. The sons of God from Genesis 6 who came down once already and ruined the world so completely that it had to be drowned.

Look at the photo one more time. Two tall, pale men beside the most powerful man on Earth, in uniforms no nation alive will claim, presented to the public like a state visit. If they are not Norwegians, not cosplayers, and not a hoax, if they are exactly what Iran called Tall Whites and what Billy Meier called Semjase, then answer me one question. How do you tell the difference between a kindly space brother and a blood-drinking monster that got kicked out of heaven?

You don’t. That is the trick. That has always been the trick.

The photo gets leaked, maybe by accident, maybe because the people who run things have always enjoyed waving the truth in our faces and watching us laugh it off. Then the same hand that leaked it stamps it AI by lunch, and now you will never know which it was. “It is just AI” is the most powerful sentence anyone has ever invented. It buries a hoax and it buries the truth equally well. The perfect cover is the one where the evidence and the denial arrive in the same envelope.

Most people will laugh at the demon idea, and they will laugh hard, because the alternative costs them something and a commemorative plate costs $19.99.

They are suckers for alien crap. They will wave the whole thing off and drive to Walmart for the merch. An ALIENS ARE HERE TO SAVE US t-shirt, sizes up to 4XL. A commemorative plate of Trump and the Nordic delegates shaking hands over a historic peace accord, perfect for the wall above the mantle, right beside the good china. Nobody sells a plate of the Watchers of Genesis. That design does not move units.

The smiling and the peace talk and the ecology lectures are the sales pitch. The product they actually want is your worship. It is what they came for in the garden, and what they offered in the desert when they laid every kingdom on Earth at the feet of a carpenter and he told them no, and it is what they are after now. They did not come to save anyone. They came to be adored by people who would never knowingly bow to a demon, which is why the demon shows up seven feet tall and beautiful and worried sick about your carbon footprint.

Yes, I am the religious lunatic out in the backyard with a shovel, digging a shelter and praying it is deep enough to ride out the wrath of God. I know exactly how that sounds. I have prayed for years that I am wrong. The Book of Revelation has stopped reading to me like ancient poetry and started reading like a forecast, and the whole alien spectacle looks like the oldest swindle there is, a way to talk a planet into handing its soul to an army of demons in spaceship costumes while it smiles for the photographer.

The kid in the grocery line knew how Bat Boy sounded too. He was dead wrong about Bat Boy. He was right about the only thing that mattered, the thing he repeated to his mother on every single ride home, the thing I have never once been able to stop believing.

The government is covering something up.

William Blake’s 1808 watercolor “Satan Rousing the Rebel Angels.” White skin, platinum hair, every last one of them. Starting to see what’s being covered up? They were never aliens. They’re the fallen and they’re back for Round 2.

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You cannot dig a fallout shelter when you rent a room by the month, so I am doing the next best thing and writing it all down where it cannot be quietly deleted by a ghost on X. The Wise Wolf runs on coffee and on you. Not on galactic goodwill, and definitely not on commemorative plates.

A paid subscription keeps the lights on and buys me a little more time to be wrong about all of this in peace.

If it turns out I am right, paid subscribers get first dibs on the shovel.

Help keep the Wise Wolf howling.